Swarthmore College fraternity's bid flier sparks criticism

Swarthmore College has long had the reputation of being a forward thinking institution. But when senior Marian Firke saw a bid flier for the Phi Psi Fraternity on campus, she had to take a step back.

That’s because the flier featured a collage of small photos of naked women on the cover. It was simply something Firke did not expect to see.

“I was horrified, shocked, and very deeply upset.” said Firke, who said she first saw the bid Sunday night. “It made me angry to learn that a fraternity that has been making promises to our community for months about the positive changes they plan to make would distribute such sexist and degrading bids.

“It felt like all of our conversations for the last six months were completely hollow. It’s very distressing to learn that your classmates don’t view you as fully human.”

While it was bad enough for Firke to see it once, she was then told by another classmate that specific type of bid has been distributed for years.

“I was most upset, though, when I learned from another senior that when he was a freshman, his bid looked identical,” Firke said. “This means that this bid design has been distributed for at least the last four years — and, more disturbingly, that every current member of the fraternity received and accepted this bid image.”

Firke and some friends were upset enough to circulate a petition on campus to ask the Student Budget Committee to withhold funding from fraternities if they do not have at least a 10 percent female membership.

Firke points out, this is not a matter of just a couple of students going awry, it’s a matter of everyone who has joined Phi Psi in the last four years in some way condoning the image.

“When conversations about the fraternities take place at Swarthmore, students often like to say that our Greek life is ‘different’ and that it would be wrong to blame the entire organization for the behavior of a few bad apples,” Firke said. “But in reality, every person in that fraternity has made the decision to join after having seen this picture.”

Once the Swarthmore College administration learned of the images, it said the bid will no longer be in circulation. There were online reports of the bids being re-posted on campus Tuesday night but being removed by early Wednesday morning.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the fraternity’s use of totally inappropriate imagery and it will stop now,” said Swarthmore College Dean of Students Liz Braun. “This is the first we have heard of such a thing, and we’re putting a stop to it now.”

The school announced Wednesday afternoon that it is working with the fraternity to make sure there are no repeat or similar occurrences of the bid.

“Two of the essential values of the Swarthmore College community are respect for others and treating one another with dignity,” said Swarthmore College Associate Dean Liliana Rodriguez. “We are working with the fraternity on a multi-faceted remedy that will require training and other measures be successfully completed before the fraternity can resume its recruitment efforts or host social events to ensure that our values are upheld, and that such a situation will not recur.”

Firke says the swift action is a bit of good news. She’s not sure that would have happened during even the last school year.

“What I am most struck by now, though, is the swift action that the administration has taken against the bids,” Firke said. “The image was immediately taken seriously and recognized as creating a hostile and misogynistic atmosphere on campus.

“The school wouldn’t have taken this kind of imagery this seriously even as recently as four months ago. So seeing this progress makes me really optimistic that Swarthmore is entering a new era. And to me, this is the most important story: that a broken institutional response to gender discrimination is beginning to right itself.”

Swarthmore’s reaction, or lack thereof, to gender discrimination was highlighted last spring when students Mia Ferguson and Hope Brinn led a group that filed a Cleary Act violation claiming that the college under-reported cases of sexual misconduct. Ferguson and Brinn also filed a Title IX violation for the same reasons to the Department of Education, which began an investigation of those claims by Ferguson, Brinn and others, this summer.

The school also did its own review on the issue, leading to several administrative changes to help address and report sexual misconduct claims in the future.